What a Life!

Monday I decided to make another attempt at potty training. The theory was that I would put Ben in underwear and pants, and when he ran out of clean clothes, we would stop for the day.

I put him in real clothes around noon, and by 1:00, we were on the third set of clothes. Yes, that’s every 20 minutes he wet himself.

The first time he was quite upset about it. I’ve had in in disposables exclusively recently because the cloth diapers we were using were getting too small and they weren’t very absorbent anymore so we were having them leak fairly often. Enough of that.

The first time he was upset about being wet, and after that he didn’t seem to care. I would take his clothes off and then sit him on the potty for a couple minutes while I got out some fresh clothes.

Here he is, sitting on his potty. As you can see, he was really enjoying this.

Around 1:00, Joey was ready to go down for his nap. I was sitting in the glider nursing him, and Ben was running around like a maniac. I told him to slow down, but of course, he didn’t listen.

He ran right in front of me again, and this time I stuck my foot out to stop him.

I stopped him alright. He didn’t see my foot, and he fell. And when he stood up, there was blood everywhere.

Joey was happily nursing…so I held him with one hand and tried to get Ben into the bathroom where I had water and could try and figure out what was going on.

He had a nose bleed, and blood was coming out of his left nostril about one huge drip per second.

Steve gets nose bleeds all the time, and Ben has had them too. But this was the worst I’ve ever seen.

What do you do when someone is bleeding? This is a three-year-old, remember. I didn’t want to tip his head back for fear he’d choke on the blood. I tried putting pressure on it, but the nose is not an easy place to apply pressure, and he’s a three-year-old and three-year-olds don’t appreciate pressure applied to a sore, bleeding nose.

I had Ben in the tub. The floor of the tub was covered in blood. I mean, he probably only lost about a tablespoon of blood. It just looked like a lot. His hands were covered with it, his face was covered with it, and he was touching the shower curtain and the walls so they had blood on them too. Oh my!

I took Joey and put him down in his crib, hoping he’d fall asleep. I went back to Ben and decided all I could do was monitor how much blood he was losing and see if it was starting to stop. It did finally start to slow down, but it took a good ten minutes before it had pretty much stopped.

I ran water in the tub to rinse out all the blood, and I wiped the walls down as good as I could. When most of it had been washed away, I filled the tub with water and gave Ben a bath. I wiped off his face gently, and I gave him his fish so he’d play in the water and the blood on his hands would come off on its own. He’d stopped crying at this point, and playing with his fish seemed to make him feel better.

When I got him out of the tub, I put him back in a diaper. I put the bloody rags and my bloody shirt in the same laundry basket I’d brought into the bathroom to gather his soiled clothes from potty training. I took the basket downstairs and washed everything with a generous helping of hydrogen peroxide.

And thus ended our first attempt at potty training this week.

On Tuesday, I didn’t even bother to try. I did have somewhat of an ah-ha moment, though: I decided that it wasn’t just Ben who needed to be motivated to potty train with fun things like stickers and stories and fishing trips. I need a treat too for making myself figure out how to get him trained. I’m thinking it’s going to be yarn. Expensive yarn. Expensive yarn for me. Now that’s more like it…